Raymond Weir

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Sunday, 4 March 2018

I've been talking with people recently about the increasing popularity of ‘long-form’ internet chat shows and wondering:

a) why
this is happening and

b) why so much of the really interesting political and
philosophical content is being produced in America. As far as I can tell, there
are very few British equivalents (although I’d be delighted if someone pointed
me towards something which would disprove that assertion).

I'm not sure why this seems to be the case, but there
are, I think, a couple of ‘broad brushstroke’ observations that could be made. Perhaps
because of the way the nation had to win its independence, the American psyche
seems more readily tuned to notions of intellectual freedom, particularly to
ideas that might, broadly speaking, be described as iconoclastic and /or
libertarian (although I realise that these days that, in itself, might be seen
by some as a pejorative term). Americans have a positive concept of citizenship
which –generally speaking- makes them less inclined to trust centralised
authority.

By contrast, many British folk see themselves as subjects.
Our psyche seems more readily tuned to deference and I think this applies as
much to institutions and political parties as it does to class. Perhaps as a
result of the conditions which prevailed during and after World War 2, our political
discourse seems more likely to be framed within implicitly statist concepts and
notions. Indeed, some of these have become such articles of faith that many folk
appear to be unaware that there might be other ways of thinking about them. To
take two obvious examples: Start a thread on any social network questioning the
sheer wonderfulness of either the NHS and /or the BBC and you’ll soon encounter
something very close to cult-like behaviour (by that, I mean an unwillingness
to consider the possibility of any deviation from received views).

I only have an outsider’s superficial grasp of American
mainstream media, so I won’t comment on the failings which are causing people on
that side of the Atlantic to look elsewhere for nourishment. In the UK, the
mainstream channels persist with the pretence of impartiality, a notion that permeates
a lot of news content like a bad smell. Just occasionally, political debate
‘red in tooth and claw’ is allowed to break out, but generally speaking, the quality
of discourse is dismally shallow.

It is inevitable, once consumers start noticing
this, that some will decide to shop around. The popularity of the so-called ‘intellectual
dark web’ has come about because people are rejecting the orthodoxies and pieties
of the mainstream media, demanding instead content which treats them like
adults and which recognises that every story contains degrees of nuance. They want discussion that isn’t stale and managed; they want debate
which doesn’t banish some topics to the realm of the forbidden.

With the mainstream media unwilling or unable to provide
such a service, some consumers will naturally flock to platforms which allow real
conversations, unmediated by spin, to take place between real people. The popularity
of these alternative outlets is evidence that there is, after all, an appetite
for serious discussion about complicated ideas.

Saturday, 17 February 2018

In 1993, the rock press started to talk about
something called ‘Britpop’. I had no idea what it meant, other than that
someone had invented yet another music genre. The phenomenon went on to carry some
cultural weight, although perhaps not always for the reasons celebrated by some
commentators. Depending on your point of view, Noel Gallagher hanging around
Downing Street with Tony Blair was either the zenith of ‘Cool Britannia’ or the
precise moment at which rock music relinquished its risible claim to be the
standard bearer for anything resembling a counter-cultural movement. Here’s a
clue: If you’re sipping tea with the Prime Minister, you may still fancy
yourself as a rebel, but you are most definitely inside the tent, pissing out.

It is generally accepted that the first two Britpop
albums were by Suede and The Auteurs. Suede had some good songs, but the
production on their album was awful, spoiled by an excess of washy reverb and the
vocals being too far back in the mix. The singer, Brett Anderson, wrote lyrics
coyly alluding to vague homosexual encounters and once claimed in an interview
that he was "a bisexual
man who never had a homosexual experience". It seemed a bit lame, but
at least he looked like a bona fide pop star.

By contrast, Luke Haines of The Auteurs, with his
foppish hair and junk shop clothes, looked more like your well-read sixth-form mate
who would sit at the back of the class making snide remarks. He sang like someone
who had only previously performed in his bedroom, with the vocals all double or
even treble-tracked; his weedy voice and cynical tone conveyed the impression of
someone who was, perhaps, out to take some revenge upon the world.

For all of the vocal limitations, his songs certainly
had a bit of devilment and wit about them. When I heard ‘Showgirl’ on the radio
for the first time, I was struck by the boldness of the opening few bars. The
sudden drop after the line “I took a showgirl for my bride” sounded brave,
assertive, brimming with confidence; it compelled me to shut up and listen. The
songs on ‘New Wave’ appeared to explore a bohemian demi-monde of actors,
musicians and dancing girls, stuck permanently between jobs and waiting for
their big showbiz break. In ‘Valet Parking’, Haines sang “I’m sick of parking
cars” and you got the feeling that he meant it.

His lyrics could be acerbic, but were sometimes mysterious
and allusive. On the splendidly cryptic ‘Idiot Brother’, he directed the
following line at surely the only person in the world who would understand what
it was about:

"And what about our fat friend
With the golden ear?"I had noidea what was going on, but it was fun trying to guess.

'American Guitars’ was interpreted by some as a Britpop statement of intent, something
along the lines of: ‘we’ve had enough of these bloody yanks influencing our pop
kids’. But the lyric is clearly celebratory, with Haines -for once- expressing
genuine admiration about something, perhaps in recognition of an authenticity that
he felt his own work might have lacked:

"Some
people are born to write, some people are born to dance
Thought I knew my place in the world, thought I knew my art.
Glad to be there, see them begin.
It was easy to see them, they were the best band to be in … American Guitars"

I really liked the sound of the group. The uncomplicated
guitar and minimalistic piano always served the interests of the songs, while James
Banbury’s
cello added a certain je ne sais quoi to
the proceedings. On ‘Bailed Out’ –which, in the wrong hands, might
easily have turned out to be a bit of a plodder- Banbury’s deft lyricism lifted
the track into another dimension.

Despite making a distinctive contribution to the
sound, Banbury was viewed as a mercenary by the group leader. In the first
volume of his memoirs (‘Bad Vibes –
Britpop and my part in its downfall’ published in 2009), Haines, throughout
the text, refers to him merely as ‘the cellist’. The book is bitter, bitchy and
misanthropic, but there is also humour in the mix, with the author being honest
about what a twat he could be at times.

‘Bad Vibes’ paints an illuminating picture of the
thin line between failure and success, but it is even better on the thinner
line between ‘modest’ and ‘massive’ success. The Auteurs famously lost out on
the Mercury Music Prize by one vote to Suede; I don’t know if that made any difference
to their respective trajectories, but Suede went on to be huge and The Auteurs didn’t.
Haines eventually got over the disappointment and, henceforth, only felt sick
about the injustice of it all once every couple of minutes.

One of the reasons I think I liked ‘New Wave’ so
much was the fact that I was -at the time- in a band which, to my ears at
least, ploughed a similar furrow to The Auteurs. “If this is Britpop”, I
thought, “bring it on”. My hope was that my own band might get a record deal on
the back of some timely zeitgeist-surfing. We also hired, at considerable
expense, a cellist to play on some of our recordings and the results convinced
me that we were in transition from being ‘half-decent’ (we were quite a solid
unit) into something ‘quite interesting’. But finding a good cellist who would
do the stuff that the rest of us were willing to do (paying for rehearsals, gigging
in grotty pubs, paying for van hire etc.) was about as difficult as finding a
unicorn that could cook; all the good ones wanted MU rates just to get out of
bed.

My band never managed to secure that elusive record deal. But I eventually
got over the disappointment and nowadays only feel sick about the injustice of
it all once every couple of minutes.

Thursday, 15 February 2018

When I was out for a walk the other day, I spotted a
sign (pictured left) in the middle of Kelvingrove Park, where the University
of Glasgow’s ‘Quidditch Club’ was holding an open session. The sight of the cavorting
students made me stop and think. I wasn’t sure what to make of it; was this a
good thing or a bad thing? Upon returning home, I told my 19-year old son about
the Quidditch Club. He drew a look of disdain and uttered four words, the first
two of which were “that is”, the fourth of which was “tragic”.

I think I understand why he responded like that. The
idea of people investing time and energy in a game that was made up by an
author, a game made for flying wizards on broomsticks, does seem quite silly.
Those students were only pretending to play a pretend game because they are not
wizards, they don’t have broomsticks and they can’t fly. It’s obviously not a ‘real’
game, so they must be a bunch of losers. Well … perhaps not. According to my internet
machine, there is a governing body (founded in 2010) called the International
Quidditch Association. The version being played by those students is sometimes described
as ‘Muggle Quidditch’, because it accepts that the participants aren’t wizards,
don’t have actual broomsticks and can’t fly.

After making that discovery, I reviewed my impulse
to pass judgement. What is the difference, after all, between running around
with a stick between your legs and, say, pretending –as I sometimes do- that a tricky
putt on the 18th green is actually for the US Masters?

Lots of young folk prefer to get their kicks sitting
in front of a computer, so we should applaud the fact that the Quidditch Club members
were out there having fun, taking part in an activity which involved physical
exercise and social intercourse. There are worse things those students could
have done with their time. They might have joined some ‘triggered-by-inappropriate-words-in-literature’
group and, instead of 'Quidditching' in the park, been out demonstrating their
belief in equity and diversity by burning books or pulling down statues.

This made me think a bit more about the extent to
which fantasy should be a legitimate part of an adult life. Is playing a game invented
by an author a less authentic fantasy than some others we could name? Are
students running around with broomsticks any more tragic than those who escape
into works of fiction or those who follow football teams around the country or those
who pretend that their tricky putt on the 18th hole might win them a
major golf championship? (Don’t answer that last bit, because you’ll just hurt
my feelings).

Some would argue that there are plenty of problems
in the world for us to solve and that frivolous pastimes just distract us from
the serious business of improving the lot of the poor, the disadvantaged and the
oppressed. But people who can only talk about serious stuff are, generally speaking,
the sort of people that you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with.

The game of Quidditch is nonsense on stilts (or at
least nonsense on a pretend broomstick), but a life lived without fantasy, fun and
frivolity would, I think, be far less rich than one concentrated on purely
utilitarian concerns.

This topic is probably worth exploring in some
depth, but I’ll leave it for the moment. I need to get back to practising my
golf swing, because the US Masters is only a few weeks away.

Monday, 12 February 2018

Further
to last week’s post, I have been involved in several interesting discussions
with various folk over the merits and demerits of Doctor Peterson’s work. A lot
of the criticism being circulated online claims that his views are somehow
‘dodgy’, but the critics don’t often get around to a full examination of those
views, preferring instead to focus on how ‘dreadful’ his audience is.

The more
interesting topic, I think, is to ask why Peterson’s message is resonating
with so many young people. His recent speaking engagements in London (booked
before the transmission of that Channel 4 interview) sold out in minutes. A few
weeks ago, an American college campus invited him to speak at their 400-seat
theatre. He was ‘no-platformed’ by the usual zealots, so the organisers of the
event decided to book the only available local alternative, a 1,500-seat
concert hall. It sold out.

Much of
the criticism characterises this audience as ‘alt-right angry white males’ (although
mostly male, Peterson’s audience is clearly mixed); that level of ‘analysis’
-and it is an act of generosity to describe it thus- will get us nowhere.

The
Independent published an article about the Channel 4 interview under this
headline:

'When
white men feel they are losing power, any level of nastiness is possible.'

That
wasn’t just intellectually feeble; it was utterly reprehensible. This kind of
thing actually reinforces one of Peterson’s key messages: namely, that identity
politics is a dead-end street and -at the end of that street- lies a whole heap
of trouble. When I was growing up, to have assumed (and judged) someone’s views
from their ethnicity, age or gender would have been considered discriminatory,
vulgar and racist; now it has become the norm.

We are in
a deep hole with this stuff, yet some folk want to keep on digging. I’d suggest
that one of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is that many people
have decided that they don’t like the view from that hole.

Tuesday, 6 February 2018

If there is anyone out there who still hasn’t
watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with the Clinical Psychologist
Jordan Peterson, I would strongly recommend that you check out what was a
wonderfully illuminating piece of television. I found it riveting, but I’m not
sure if that was in spite of -or because of- the interviewer’s insistence on
trying to put words into her interviewee’s mouth at almost every turn. If you
try counting the number of times she says “so what you’re saying
is …” before inserting a ridiculously skewed interpretation of what he has
actually said, you will need all of your fingers and some of your toes. It is
evident that ‘listening’ and ‘responding to what the other person has actually
said’ were not part of Ms Newman’s game plan.

Some have argued that it was her job to
challenge Peterson and not to just nod in agreement with whatever he was
saying. This is a fair point and, if Channel 4 News applied that principle
across the board, it would certainly present itself as a more balanced source
of information. Peterson may not be right about everything, but even when he's
wrong, he has reached his position because he has at least considered the available
evidence. But, in an age in which feelings appear to trump reason, he is
regularly libelled as a neo-Nazi, slave-trading, baby-eating agent of the
patriarchy, or something.

Ms Newman’s lazy assumption was that her
guest was an ‘alt-right' misogynist provocateur. Her researchers (I’m assuming
she will have had some help) must be pretty dim if they thought that some
back-of-a-fag-packet observations on this man’s significant academic oeuvre
would cause him to recant his views. Mainstream news outlets regularly claim
moral superiority over so-called 'fake news' sources, so examples of this kind
of shoddy practice deserve to be highlighted and ridiculed.

There is a sense in which the exchange also
illustrated what can happen to polite discourse once certain difficult topics
are declared ‘off-limits’. Perfectly reasonable people who might, under normal
circumstances, be prepared to discuss those difficult topics, start to retreat
from debate. Once you’ve witnessed some poor sod raise his head above the
parapet only to be monstered as a misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe
(they’re all the same thing), it makes sense to keep your opinions to yourself.
But people who shout those magic ‘shut-down’ words to dismiss their opponents
eventually lose the ability to argue. And, when they come up against someone
who won’t shut up and won’t back down, someone prepared to use logic and reason
to make their points, the shouters have nowhere else to go. They don’t have the
tools to argue because they’ve never had to do it; once their magic words lose
potency, shouters are stuck in a very deep hole.

I have been following Jordan Peterson’s work
since his experiences at Toronto University dragged him into what -for
shorthand purposes- I'll call the 'cultural debate'. During that time, he has
conducted himself with dignity and intelligence. He has had exactly this kind
of discussion many, many times and is way too smart to be intimidated by folk
who, rather than listen, choose to project their own ‘evil Nazi’ fantasies onto
him simply because he doesn’t share their worldview. His critics, generally speaking, don't want
(or are not equipped) to refute his arguments. Their standard approach is:

When these tactics fail (and they always do),
resort to: 3) Playing the 'victim' card.

On youtube, the average Channel 4 News
interview gets a few thousand hits. On big stories, the numbers might head
somewhere north of 100,000. The Newman-Peterson interview, at the time of
writing, has had more than six million views. Once it went viral, Channel 4
announced that it had consulted ‘security experts’ (but curiously, not the
police) because of ‘vile misogynist abuse’ received by their presenter. With
the help of their ideological allies in the press, they attempted to switch the
narrative from ‘hectoring presenter embarrasses herself with civilised
professor’ to ‘female presenter bullied and exposed to vile misogynist
abuse’ from Peterson’s so-called ‘army of trolls’. Make of that what you
will. As a fan of his work, I’d be more inclined to thank Ms Newman
for handing him such an epic victory.

However one chooses to interpret the
interview, it feels like something significant may be happening. It’s not unusual for the younger generation
to rebel against what is on offer from the world created by their parents and,
when I listen to the kind of conversations that are going on, when I check out
some of the podcasts, I get the sense that a cultural shift may be taking
place. Jordan Peterson appears to have connected with a young audience in
search of authentic meaning, an audience that suspects it could get a better
deal than the one they’ve been told is the only one on the table. We assume
that young people need their information delivered in bite-sized chunks, yet
many of them clearly have the appetite to absorb long and deep discussions
about complicated political and philosophical ideas.
(To take one example, Joe Rogan’s podcast
with Petersen and Professor Brett Weinstein lasts for 2 hours 45 minutes and
has been watched by 3 million people).

Some young people seem to have worked out
that television and newspapers aren’t going to help them. Why trust a tired
medium in which demonstrably partial people have set themselves up as the
entitled gatekeepers of information? They seem to have worked out that, by and
large, teachers and college professors aren’t going to help them. Why trust a
profession in which the intellectual gene pool is so dismally shallow? Lots of
young people understand that when someone is in favour of every kind of
diversity except intellectual diversity, that person is more of an
indoctrinator than an educator.

When critics point out that Peterson’s
message is not exactly 'new', they overlook an obvious point: To many young
folk, what he’s saying seems new because, generally speaking, they will
have been taught by people who adhere to the dead-end ideas of post-modern
cultural relativism. And the people who taught those people will, generally
speaking, have been taught by people who also adhered to those ideas. And the
people who taught those people … you get my drift.

In the science fiction film
‘The Matrix’, the rebel leader Morpheus offers the main character Neo a choice
between two pills: red or blue.

"This is your last chance. After
this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake
up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill:
you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

The
hero must choose between the convenient falsehoods maintained by the blue pill
and the inconvenient truths revealed by the red.

Having been trained to react to cultural
relativism’s trigger words, drilled to respond to the poisonous diktats of
identity politics, young people are now being 'red-pilled' by Jordan Peterson.
If we are to avoid hurtling towards a nightmare post-dialogue age wherein
'right' and 'left' are literally unable to communicate with each other, I can't
think of a more important job or, indeed, a better man to do it.

About Me

A few years ago, I promised that I would never start a blog; this is it.
On this blog, I plan to respond to real (or imagined) slights by posting coruscating put-downs of my enemies, competitors and -occasionally- friends. I also plan to maintain the acrimonious simmering of a series of longstanding grudges and petty disputes.
But mainly, the blog will faithfully record a pointless and pedestrian series of idle musings, attempted libels and ill-considered theories about popular culture, sport, politics, music and the meaning of life.
For the last couple of years, I've been writing about an album I'm recording; yes, it's nearly finished.
The views represented on this blog are not necessarily endorsed by the author, unless they are.